As an internet marketer, let’s face it, you always got to be putting yourself out there in order to be seen online. One of the best ways to do this is to take advantage of all the great social media sites out there by simply continuing your efforts to grow your social networks and keep interaction with your social networks.
By doing what any member of a social media site would do, naturally commenting and replying to comments, will get your where you want to be online. Of course you’re not selling anything except for having your main site in your social media profile. That’s it, everything else is natural commenting and interaction to get free traffic to your profile, which in turn will get free traffic to your main site or business.
It’s not rocket science by any means, but it does take a good amount of time and effort on your part. This is why I recommend taking advantage of such social media tasks when you’re bored. Why not? You don’t have to be 100% focused when doing such a thing. You could be watching TV or listening to some music while keeping interaction going in your social networks. Am I right about this or what?
Alright, let’s get straight to the point on some goals you can try to reach while you’re in that state of boredom. A good note to take here is that moderation is always the key to success. This is why I recommend limiting to your efforts to 5 at a time. You can do more a day, but 5 things per social network is actually quite a bit of work if you are legitimately commenting and making friends online.
Here we go!
Make 5 new Facebook friend requests
Go through your Facebook friend’s friends and see who else you know. If you don’t know them all too well, make sure to leave a quick message in your initial friend request to help break the ice. Things like, “I’m a friend of so and so and we both like music.” Doesn’t have to be complex. Go to your news feed as soon as you log in and reply a couple comments as well.
Comment on 5 videos and request friends with 5 people on Youtube
This doesn’t take very much time and it’s always a whole lot of fun to watch neat videos at Youtube. I can almost guarantee you that every person that accepts you as a friend will check out your profile. This will get traffic to your videos, which will then hopefully lead them to your website.
Follow 5 people on Twitter
Go through people you’re already following and see other Twitter profiles that have the same niche as you. Become a follower, then you will get exposure to your site. I don’t like using programs and scripts to build my Twitter network, instead, I prefer to do it the old fashion way.
Comment on 5 blogs in your niche
Simply do a Google search and find similar blogs to yours and submit natural comments and actually take the time to really find out what the blogger is writing about. Make sure to only comment on blogs that take a name and url so you can always get a link back to your site as well as most likely having the owner of that blog definitely take a look at your site. You know they will too, blog owners don’t want to link to bad sites, so they will take a quick look at your site. I know I do.
Do 5 forum posts or replies
If you’re not already a member of some forums, you definitely should be. Forums have always been a good way to get traffic and links back to your sites. Just make sure you fill out a simple signature in your forum’s profile area for everyone you’re a part of. Then just naturally reply to people’s posts and people will see your site, you will get traffic from this. You’ll at least get a hit from the person that started the topic in the first place. Starting your own unique topic will get you even more traffic.
Do 1 blog post for the day
Constantly getting unique content out on the world wide web will always give you free targeted search engine traffic. I try and make it a goal to do at least one blog post a day because I know over time every one of these blog posts are getting me visitors to my sites and at the same time I’m helping people find information on the web.
I know that was a lot of information. Now, I mentioned doing these things when you’re bored online. Now imagined if you made these things a daily endeavor. Think about how much traffic this would generate, over time, to your main website(s).
Well, let’s take a look, shall we?
With 365 days in a year, you’ll end up with results similar to these:
- 365 unique blog posts and pages to your site.
- 1,825 forum posts and replies, your link will be on all of these.
- 1,825 blog comments on other peoples sites, your link will be on theirs.
- About 1,825 new Twitter followers, if they follow you back.
- 1,825 comments on Youtube with link to your profile plus the friends.
- About 1,825 new friends on Facebook.
I know it is almost impossible to accomplish these kinds of results in our busy lives, but a little bit everyday can and will add up. I don’t waste my time with smaller social networks either. In my mind, the 3 social networks you should put your time and effort into building are Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. I see the most potential with these 3.
Tags: Blog Post, Blogger, Bored Online, Commenting, Facebook, Forum, Free Traffic, Friend Request, Friends Online, Internet Marketer, Internet Marketing Goals, Profile, Replying, Search Engine Traffic, Social Media, Social Media Sites, Twitter, Unique Topic, Youtube
Oh yes, I said it, good old Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Don’t you just love that this obsolete browser is not only still around but that people are still actually using it? Fortunately, I do have some good news for you about why you really shouldn’t care whether or not Internet Explorer 6 renders your site properly or not.
Even though the crappy browser is still being used, it’s not being used by individuals per say, but by Government and other networked entities that still use the old Windows framework to keep all their systems networked.
The reason why this is good is because Government and private employees are not supposed to be browsing websites unrelated to getting their work done anyway. This means the likely hood of your website even being seen by this small percentage of people is pretty slim to begin with.
Even individuals of third world Countries aren’t using Internet Explorer 6 anymore. It’s so easy for individuals to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer, but like I said before, it’ not so easy for a Government entity that is still using the old Windows network to get so easily upgraded.
A large majority of us hate Internet Explorer 6 and the entire series of Internet Explorer browsers in general because of their strict conformance rules on w3c css and such anyway. One of my biggest pet peeves about Internet Explorer in general, even though it’s still the super power when it comes to Internet browsers, is the fact that they still haven’t conformed with the border-radius css rule that automatically rounds all corners to make your site look really cool without images.
Anyway, back to my point. I would only focus your efforts on making sure your sites work in the latest and greatest browsers and totally forget about Internet Explorer 6 all together. It’s just not worth the time for the low amount of traffic you’ll get from that particular browser.
Tags: Border Radius, Browser, IE6, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 6, Windows Framework
You know, it’s funny, before I owned my own affiliate program I was always concerned about the affiliate program being a scam. Now I’m finding out through trial and error that there sure are a lot of the affiliates out there that will do anything and everything in their abilities to scam affiliate programs. It’s kind of ironic, isn’t though?
How do they scam affiliate programs?
Well, the easiest way for them to do so is by owning multiple e-mail addresses and knowing how to manipulate IP addresses so it looks like they are signing up a new unique individual each time when they really are the same person. It’s usually someone who doesn’t have a real stake in the affiliate program with nothing to lose.
Don’t believe me? Here is an example affiliate program scammer I recently caught signing up multiple accounts in my affiliate program under multiple affiliates.
You’ll notice how similar the e-mail addresses are and also the IP addresses a very similar. This is a sign of an affiliate scammer in your mist.
Let me quickly go over some affiliate program essentials that you should have to protect yourself against fraudulent sign ups online.
- A confirmation link in initial sign up e-mail to confirm affiliate accounts so they don’t use someone else’s e-mail address.
- Require the affiliate to manually log into their account before they are approved.
- Manually approve all affiliates so you can check for any fraudulent activity.
- Make sure your affiliate program checks for unique IP addresses
- Look for similar names when someone signs up, could be a sign of the same user signing up multiple times.
- Make sure your affiliate program can quickly and easily manage and check through all affiliate sign ups for duplicates because sometimes you’ll miss some.
- Affiliates that sign up with weird names that don’t make sense like (bat man, super man, spider man) these are probably scammers.
- Building a relationship with your top producers is a good idea because these are the ones most likely to sign up the most fraudulent sign ups at times.
- Requiring your affiliate program to accept e-mails as user names is a good idea because that way only one unique e-mail address per affiliate can be used.
- Make sure the terms and conditions of your affiliate program note that fraudulent sign ups will be deleted and that all affiliate sign ups are approved according to your terms that the affiliates must follow in order to be accepted.
Your affiliate program might not need all these safety credentials if you don’t offer any incentives for affiliates signing up, but if you do, then it is a smart idea to protect your affiliate program from scamming affiliates.
I use Post Affiliate Pro 4 to manage my affiliate program. Don’t worry, I don’t have a Post Affiliate Pro affiliate link to promote them. I am a real customer of them and they are who I use. I chose them because I knew designing my own affiliate program from scratch would take forever and that I would have a whole bunch of security loop holes I would have to learn the hard way without them.
After discovering how many affiliate scammers there really are out there, I am proud to say I really did make the right decision to go with a professional service. Otherwise my affiliate program would probably be out of business by now with all the fake sign ups I would’ve had to have paid by now.
Tags: Affiliate Program, Affiliates, Confirmation Link, IP Addresses, Multiple E-mail Adresses, Post Affiliate Pro 4, Protect your Affiliate Program, Scamming, Security Loop Holes
It really doesn’t bother me too much that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) decided to be a little more strict in how U.S. website owners write reviews about different products and services, NOT!!! I’m just kidding, it’s really for the consumers. I mean I know there are bad people out there, I just never thought of myself as one of them. Now we all have to suffer a little bit more for the errors of others.
So how do we as bloggers and website owners follow the new FTC guidelines correctly?
I searched all over the Internet for some good straight forward answers on whether I should simply put a disclaimer at the end of my blog post if I make money when someone signs up through my affiliate link that I wrote only good things about. Or instead, should I be able to do a site wide blanket disclaimer for everything? I’m not sure.
Here is all that Mary Engle, the Associate Director – Bureau of Consumer Protection, says about what you need to do.
According to Mary Engle it shouldn’t be too complicated. But my concern is before I go through all my websites and their corresponding pages (over 1,000 pages be honest), I want to make sure that I am updating them correctly.
It looks like the FTC is leaving it up to us to be creative in how we disclose our relationships with the websites and products we write about.
If you write a review about a website or product and you make money off people signing up or purchasing, we simply need to disclose this in our own unique way to our readers and visitors.
Even after looking through the new FTC guidelines I was unable to find a really good example. So I can only assume it really is up to us.
I believe the best way to disclose that you are either making money off of a product you are writing about or have received some sort of compensation for writing about a product or website is to simply leave a note at the bottom of the blog post or page it was written about on.
There are no real rules on how you can do this, none that I’ve found anyway. Please let me know if I’m being an idiot on this one or not.
Example #1
You just wrote a review about a website using a referral link from the advertiser’s website. At the bottom of the page or blog post you could simply write something like this:
Disclaimer - An affiliate link from Company "XYZ" is used on this page.
You could add more to this, but according to the FTC, they only expect you to be straight forward and open, they don’t give any other instructions on how to disclose your relationship with the website or product you just wrote an article about.
Example #2
You just wrote a review about an Amazon product using your Amazon affiliate link. At the bottom of the post or page put:
Disclaimer - The product link on this web page is an Amazon affiliate link.
That should do according the the FTC’s vague guidelines.
Example #3
You wrote an article about a video game that you were given free from the gaming Company in order to say good things about them. At the bottom of the page or post simply put this:
Disclaimer - XYZ Company gave a free copy of this video game for reviewing purposes.
That should do. Notice how I’m not referring to myself in these disclosures, I’m just letting the readers know someone is making money off of it whether it is me or not.
Are you getting where I’m going with this? The FTC didn’t set any strict guidelines on how you disclose your relationships with the advertisers you write about. So as far as I see it, you just need to disclose it somewhere on the same page and you should be good to go.
Good luck on the December 1st, 2009 switch over!
Tags: Affiliate Link, Disclaimer, Examples, Federal Trade Commission, FTC, FTC Guidelines, Guidelines
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The importance of making your Wordpress author comment urls open in a new window and the code to make it happen
This, simply put, is the main reason why you wouldn’t want visitors to leave your site completely. Unfortunately, most Wordpress blog theme templates don’t set this up for you automatically. If you’re not sure if yours does, just go to one of your single posts and click on one of your comment author links. If it removes your blog completely from the browser, then you don’t have the target=”_blank” attribute set up properly.
Thankfully, I came across a really cool site that explains exactly how to set up your Wordpress theme’s function.php file to open comment author links in a new window.
If you’re not concerned about all the ins and outs of how to accomplish this, just follow these instructions:
Once logged into your Wordpress admin area, go to Appearance, then Editor. Once there, find your functions.php file. Click on it, and simply paste the following php code at the bottom of the file before the php closing tag (looks like this “?>”.
// Make comment author link URL open in new window
function comment_author_link_window() {
global $comment;
$url = get_comment_author_url();
$author = get_comment_author();
if ( empty( $url ) || 'http://' == $url )$return = $author;
else
$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' target='_blank'>$author</a>";
return $return;
}
add_filter('get_comment_author_link', 'comment_author_link_window');
Hope this code is of use to you.
Tags: Author Comment Urls, Blog, Functions.php, Open in New Window, Theme Templates, Wordpress